Runaway Bride: St Clare's Midnight Escape and the Romance of Vocation

There is perhaps no more delightful scandal in all the annals of Christian history than the spectacle of a perfectly respectable young noblewoman sneaking out of her family palazzo in the dead of night, abandoning silk gowns for sackcloth, and trading a comfortable marriage bed for a stone floor in a tumbledown chapel. It is precisely the sort of magnificent madness that makes the saints worth studying and the world worth escaping—at least occasionally. For in the story of Clare of Assisi's midnight flight, we find not merely the tale of one young woman's rebellion against convention, but a perfect parable of that greater romance which calls every soul away from the safe harbors of respectability toward the thrilling uncertainties of divine love.

The modern mind, with its touching faith in career planning and its horror of anything that might disrupt a five-year plan, finds such behavior not merely impractical but positively unhinged. Here was Clare Offreduccio, eighteen years old, beautiful, wealthy, and already promised in marriage to a suitable young man from another prominent Assisi family. She had everything that our contemporary culture considers essential for happiness: security, status, and a sensible future mapped out by people who knew what was best for her. And she threw it all away for what? To follow a madman who talked to birds and called poverty his bride.

But this is precisely where our modern sensibilities go astray, for they mistake the nature of Clare's choice entirely. The world saw a young woman running away from a good marriage; Clare herself understood that she was running toward the only marriage that mattered. She was not fleeing responsibility but embracing it; not abandoning love but discovering it; not rejecting romance but finding the only romance worth having.

Consider the exquisite timing of her escape. It was Palm Sunday night, 1212, and all of Assisi was sleeping off the festivities of the day when Christ's triumphal entry into Jerusalem was celebrated. While the city dreamed of earthly kingdoms, Clare slipped away to find her place in the kingdom of heaven. The irony is almost too perfect: on the very night when Christians everywhere had waved palm branches in remembrance of a King who came riding on a donkey, Clare herself made her own triumphal entry into a life of holy poverty.

She did not go alone, of course. Her younger sister Pacifica and a handful of trusted friends accompanied her on that moonlit journey to the Porziuncola, that tiny chapel where Francis and his growing band of brothers lived their strange life of radical simplicity. But in another sense, she went utterly alone, for she was leaving behind not merely her family and friends, but an entire way of understanding what life was for.

The world into which Clare was born had very definite ideas about what young noblewomen were supposed to do with themselves. They were to marry well, bear children, manage households, and perhaps engage in a bit of genteel charity when time permitted. It was a perfectly reasonable system, and it had worked quite satisfactorily for centuries. The problem was that Clare had caught a glimpse of something infinitely more unreasonable and infinitely more satisfying.

She had heard Francis preach, had listened to his impossible dream of wedding Lady Poverty, had witnessed the joy that radiated from these ragged men who seemed to possess nothing and yet somehow owned the world. In their company, the carefully planned life that awaited her began to look not like security but like a beautiful prison, not like fulfillment but like a slow suffocation of everything that made life worth living.

And so she ran. Not in despair or rebellion, but in that peculiar kind of holy rebellion that recognizes when obedience to man becomes disobedience to God. She ran toward uncertainty because certainty had begun to feel like death. She ran toward poverty because riches had revealed themselves to be surprisingly expensive. She ran toward a future that made no earthly sense because the earthly future that made perfect sense had begun to feel like no future at all.

The scene at the Porziuncola that night must have been extraordinary beyond imagination. Picture it: a young noblewoman in her finest clothes, surrounded by a handful of peasant friars who probably smelled of honest labor and holy poverty. Francis himself took scissors to her golden hair, the crowning glory of medieval femininity, and clothed her in rough brown cloth. It was a ceremony that reversed every expectation of her world, where women were adorned rather than divested, celebrated for their beauty rather than their willingness to abandon it.

But here we encounter the first great paradox of Clare's story. In losing her worldly beauty, she became infinitely more beautiful. In abandoning her feminine finery, she became more truly feminine than any court lady. In giving up the romance the world offered, she discovered the romance that the world cannot give. The bride who fled her earthly bridegroom had become the bride of Christ, and in that celestial marriage she found a love that no human affection could rival.

The world, naturally, was scandalized. Her family was furious, her former betrothed presumably confused, and polite society utterly bewildered. A perfectly good marriage had been ruined by religious enthusiasm—the sort of thing that sensible people were supposed to outgrow. They tried everything to get her back: threats, pleadings, legal maneuvers, even an attempted kidnapping. But Clare had discovered something that made her immovable as a mountain: she had found her vocation.

Vocation—now there is a word that our age has systematically misunderstood. We have reduced it to career choice, as if the voice of God were merely a divine career counselor helping us find the right job. But vocation, from the Latin vocare, means calling, and a calling is not something we choose so much as something that chooses us. It is the voice that speaks in the depths of the heart, saying not "What do you want to do?" but "What are you made for?"

Clare's midnight escape was not the act of a young woman running away from life, but of one running toward it. She had heard her name called in the depths of her soul, had recognized the voice of the Beloved, and had discovered that no earthly love could compete with that celestial romance. The world called it madness; Clare called it sanity. The world called it waste; Clare called it fulfillment. The world called it escape; Clare called it homecoming.

Within a few days of her arrival at the Porziuncola, Clare was moved to San Damiano, that same chapel that Francis had rebuilt with his own hands after hearing Christ speak to him from the crucifix. Here she would spend the rest of her life, forty-two years of what the world would call imprisonment but which she experienced as perfect freedom. For she had discovered the paradox that confounds every age: that the highest liberty comes not from having many choices but from making the one choice that matters.

At San Damiano, Clare founded what would become the Poor Clares, the second order of the Franciscan movement. But she was no mere imitator of Francis; she was his spiritual equal, his partner in that great enterprise of showing the world what it meant to take the Gospel seriously. Where Francis wandered the roads preaching, Clare created a center of prayer and contemplation. Where Francis evangelized through action, Clare evangelized through being. Both were necessary; both were revolutionary.

The life Clare chose would horrify modern sensibilities. She slept on the ground, fasted until friends had to plead with her to eat, wore the roughest cloth, and embraced a poverty so complete that her community often went hungry. By contemporary standards, it was a life of shocking deprivation. But those who knew Clare testified that they had never seen anyone more joyful, more radiant, more obviously blessed.

This is the second great paradox of her story: that in choosing to have nothing, she gained everything. The woman who fled from one kind of love discovered a love so overwhelming that it transformed even suffering into joy. She had found what every human heart seeks without knowing it seeks: perfect love, perfect peace, perfect purpose. She had run away from a small happiness to find an infinite one.

The Poor Clares who joined her came from every level of society. Some were noblewomen like herself who had abandoned wealth and privilege; others were peasant girls who brought nothing but their hearts. What united them was not their social status but their recognition that they had been called to something extraordinary. They had heard the same voice that Clare heard on that Palm Sunday night, the voice that calls every soul away from the merely good toward the perfectly good.

Their life together was not the grim asceticism that their detractors imagined, but a celebration of the one thing worth celebrating: the love of God made manifest in community. They prayed together, worked together, laughed together, and discovered that joy multiplies when it is shared by those who have chosen the same impossible path. Their poverty was not deprivation but richness; their enclosure was not confinement but freedom; their sacrifice was not loss but gain.

The world, looking on from outside the walls of San Damiano, could not comprehend what it was seeing. Here were women who had everything the world valued—beauty, intelligence, social position—and they had given it all up for what appeared to be nothing. It was incomprehensible, unless one understood that they had traded the temporary for the eternal, the partial for the complete, the human for the divine.

Clare herself became a figure of legend within her own lifetime. Stories circulated of her miraculous healings, her prophetic visions, her ability to see events happening far away. On at least two occasions, when armies threatened Assisi, she was said to have turned them away simply by appearing at the convent window with the Blessed Sacrament. The woman who had once been powerless to choose her own husband had become so powerful that armed men fled at her presence.

But the greatest miracle was not what Clare did but what she became. The frightened girl who had crept out of her father's house in the middle of the night had become a woman of such spiritual authority that popes sought her counsel and saints traveled great distances to sit at her feet. She had run away from one kind of power only to discover a power infinitely greater: the power of perfect love perfectly lived.

The romance of Clare's vocation speaks to every age, but perhaps especially to our own. We live in a time when young people are told they can be anything they want to be, but are rarely told how to discover what they are called to be. We have multiplied choices while losing the ability to choose well. We have gained the whole world of opportunities while losing the sense that any particular opportunity might be a divine appointment.

Clare's story reminds us that true fulfillment comes not from keeping our options open but from closing them in service of the one thing that matters most. It comes not from following our hearts (which are notoriously unreliable guides) but from following the voice that calls us beyond ourselves into the heart of God. It comes not from romantic love as the world understands it, but from the romance that makes all earthly romance possible: the love affair between the Creator and His creation.

The midnight escape that began Clare's religious life was not the end of her story but the beginning of it. She who had run away from the world's idea of happiness had run straight into the arms of happiness itself. She who had abandoned earthly love had discovered heavenly love. She who had fled from one bridegroom had found the Bridegroom who would never disappoint, never fail, never ask her to be anything less than what she was made to be.

In our own age of careful planning and risk management, Clare's precipitous flight seems almost recklessly romantic. But perhaps that is exactly what faith requires: not the calculated romance of a good match, but the wild romance of a soul that has heard its name called in the night and has the courage to answer. Perhaps the real tragedy is not that some people, like Clare, abandon security for uncertainty, but that so many of us choose security over the voice that calls us to become fully alive.

For in the end, Clare's story is not really about renouncing the world but about finding the world's true meaning. She did not flee from love but toward it, not from life but into it, not from her true self but home to it. The runaway bride became the most faithful bride of all, wed to a love that will never end, committed to a romance that grows more passionate with each passing year, united to a Bridegroom who will never grow tired of wooing His beloved back to Himself.

And that, surely, is a love story worth running toward, even if it means running away from everything the world considers sensible. For some escapes are not flights from reality but flights into it, not abandonment of responsibility but embrace of the only responsibility that ultimately matters: to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and to let that love transform us into who we were always meant to be.

The bells of San Damiano still ring, calling souls to prayer, to love, to the same wild romance that claimed Clare on that distant Palm Sunday night. The question is not whether we will hear the call—the call comes to every heart—but whether we will have the courage, as Clare did, to slip away from the safe and sensible toward the dangerous and divine. For in the kingdom of heaven, it seems, the most successful marriages are often between runaway brides and a Bridegroom who specializes in impossible love.

~The Seeker's Quill